Does Your Company Have a CYA Culture?

I realized yesterday while facilitating a clients’ senior leadership team meeting that they were stuck in the old style CYA culture. You know, “Cover Your A##.”

I asked if they ever went on a construction job site and just gave out praise to the workers and the site supervisor pointing out specific areas where they were excelling or ahead of schedule. In return there was a blank stare, then a comment:

“Well, in our business if the work is done and done well, its a waste of time to rehash that stuff. We need to keep moving forward and make sure the things that aren’t done to spec need to be addressed while focusing on the next phase of the project. Looking back acknowledging things already done never had any value before.”

I could tell a light bulb had gone off in this individual’s mind while another team member chimed in, “you know we’re always looking for pictures of the good work we do and we can never find them because all we take pictures of are the problem areas so we can make sure we don’t get blamed for them or to show our sub-contractors what they need to fix. I sure wish we had some nice, photos of finished projects so we can use ‘em in our newsletter, and on our website and stuff!”

Again, more CYA. So much time is spent in corporate America covering rear-ends that the good work everyone is doing goes unnoticed and un-appreciated.

I’d like to propose a new CYA culture - “Celebrate Your Achievements!”

There is not enough of it!

This does not mean to get soft and open your company to lawsuits, lost revenue, re-doing jobs that eat into profit margins because of a lack of identifying areas that need to be addressed. What it means is taking some time throughout the day, week, month to be open to looking for, and acknowledging and recognizing, the individuals who are doing good work.

It can be as simple as a private pat on the back, or a public recognition at a monthly team breakfast or lunch with a gift certificate as a reward. You can determine what is most appropriate for your situation and budget.

I believe this type of CYA Culture will improve morale and productivity while gradually breaking down the cynicism and lack of trust in most organizations as workers begin to feel appreciated for their contribution.

Focus on Teamwork Is Misguided, Needs Paradigm Shift

There is much focus today on teamwork in the workplace. It’s about building more effective teams, working more effectively with each other in teams, supporting your teammates, etc. It’s become almost like muzak on an elevator ride to nowhere.

Focusing on teamwork in the workplace is misguided. It is misguided because most employees are rewarded for serving customers through direct sales or service, and/or manufacturing a product at a margin that leads to profitability, not for working as a team. Even if individuals are hired with “teamwork” in their job description or expectations it is a nebulous concept at best.

Many times working as a team means having to support a team member whom, a) they may not like and b) whom they may see as threat to their job security. Also, there is usually is no direct incentive for working as good team player. Company’s rarely reward based on the results of “teamwork” because it is hard to quantify, unless a specific team is brought together to achieve a specific outcome.

I believe we need to shift our thinking. We need to shift our paradigm on the concept of “teamwork” in the workplace. Let’s forget about it!

Instead let’s focus on customer service. “Internal” customer service.

Internal customer service takes a back seat to “real” or “external” customer service, which is servicing the end user of our product or service. Yet, its the internal interactions between team members (teamwork) that can drastically impact how your external customer service is applied.

Whereas many companies promote teamwork to the cynicism of the masses few encourage their workers to see their “teammates” as true customers, customers of their internal product/service delivery. What would happen if they did?

Most employees understand the value of servicing a customer and will do backflips to make the customer happy (many times to the detriment of company profits and building value in the eyes of the customer, but that’s a post for another day) while “internal” customer service and the treatment of co-workers is deplorable in many companies. As such I believe making this shift will help tremendously in raising the bar on performance for three reasons:

1) Employees understand the importance of “customer service” and adding to the definition of who their “customers” are should be an easy adjustment;

2) It is much easier to hold individuals accountable to customer service metrics than “teamwork” metrics;

3) It is easier to define in the workplace a “customer service” situation than a “teamwork” scenario thus allowing for the sharing of resources to be more easily facilitated. This alleviates the instance of those who hold back on resources in a teamwork setting due to uncertainty of the relationships necessary to achieve desired results (helps to break down the silo mentality that is ingrained in so many company cultures).

My entire shift in addressing issues of company culture and improving performance results is going to focus on “internal” customer service. As such I believe outstanding teamwork will become an easy and natural by-product of of this approach.